MADness #133.5- Horror Movies!

Welcome to another edition of Tom’s Monday MADness, the seemingly endless look back at 25 years of my work in MAD magazine, complete and unabridged! This week is part 2 of the work I did for MAD #10, December 2019. Part one was a parody of the TV show “The Handmaid’s Tale”. This second feature is a “part 2” of a sorts… the second (and so far last) of the “Xander and Kam” movie review features.

Xander and Kam were supposed to be YouTubers who do a movie review show, allowing MAD to have a single feature that would contain multiple current film “spoofs”. The concept was that multiple big movies could be referenced in a single feature, and (I presume) possible “intellectual property” could be developed with the Xander and Kam characters.

I’m not sure there was ever a chance Xander and Kam would “catch on” and end up as licensable characters, but the mini-movie parody concept was not new. MAD did it multiple times, including using parody versions of Siskel and Ebert as the hosts.

Anyway this feature was called “Xander and Kam’s Night of the Living Sequels”, and was written by Ian Boothby.

Not only are all these films being included horror movies, but they are all SEQUELS to horror movies. “It: Chapter 2”, “Annabelle Comes Home” and ‘Doctor Sleep” (sequel to “The Shining”). Thus the story is set in a graveyard, and Xander and Kam’s long suffering nemesis, the unnamed theater usher, is a zombie since he was killed in the first story.

I put the term “parody” in quotes as regards these Xander and Kam features because they are not really parodies at all. They are quick single gags related to the film in some way, and there is almost no commentary or criticism of the films themselves. The glimpses are too short for these to be in any way considered a real parody of the movies. They aren’t supposed to be.

Still this was a fun one to work on. I got to play around with some interesting lighting and color in the graveyard scenes… kind of a cartoonish E.C. throwback. I also inked all these using brush pens as opposed to dip pens and brushes, and real india ink.

That’s it for another miserable Monday MADness. We are creeping ever close to the end of the line… toon in next week for a look at my last two “MAD’s 20 Dumbest People, Events, and Things of…” I ever did for what (so far) was MAD’s last “20 Dumbest” issue.